The EBN Dispatch
Employer Branding News (EBN) comes to your ears with the same dry wit and disruptive insights you’ve come to expect from our articles and videos. We tackle the world of work, employer branding, recruitment, culture and everything in between, with a raised eyebrow and a data-backed argument. If you’re a company leader, HR rebel, or just someone who thinks ”culture fit” is a lazy excuse, you’re in the right feed. Each episode unpacks real-world employer brand moves, cuts through corporate speak, and challenges tired talent narratives. Less fluff, more facts. Occasionally funny. Always unfiltered.
Episodes
Barclays is cutting about 5,000 jobs and calls AI the icing on the cake, not the cake. More than 100 people queued for one cafe job in Manchester. Volkswagen's works council says management plans a pay freeze to 2030. This week's Paper Cut asks who is blaming AI, and who is paying.
Four themes: who is blaming AI for job cuts, the first job for young people, AI at the manager's desk, and pay and accountability. Then the Cut List, ...
Nine in ten US CEOs expect to hire. Kroger, Netflix, TomTom and Airtable are cutting. Singapore's president says the first graduate job is losing demand. This week's Paper Cut asks how much of it is really AI.
Four themes: the cuts and the reasons given for them, the squeeze on the first job against CEO optimism, the hidden cost of AI at work, and trust, pay and monitoring. Then the Cut List, with seven employers confirming cuts ...
Goldman's new hires manage AI agents, Citi shortens the ladder, Bayer cuts 70% of managers. This week's Paper Cut covers the org chart being redrawn.
Four themes: hiring that has frozen while the bottom rungs of the ladder shrink, AI rollouts with no clear owner for the people side, how companies are delivering their cuts, and the office argument reaching the courts. Then the Cut List, with seven employers confirming job reductio...
Jobless claims fell. AI adoption climbed. Job applications are up. On paper, this was a good week. Then Nike, Workday and Citi all confirmed job cuts, a lawsuit alleged Ford disguised layoffs as poor performance, and tech-sector layoffs rose 77% in a single month. This week's Paper Cut looks at the gap between what the data says and what the week actually felt like.
In this week's Paper Cut:
- Nike, Workday and Citi all cutting...
Six companies confirmed job cuts this week, spanning insurance, media, pharmaceuticals, automotive and tech, while new research finds nearly half of CHROs are excluded from AI strategy entirely. Add graduates fighting brutal odds for entry-level roles and experienced women quietly pushed out of promotion and board pipelines, and the pattern holds: the decision gets made first, and the people it affects find out after.
In this wee...
Uber's own laid-off staff say AI was already doing their jobs, even though the company's layoff memo never mentioned it. Omnicom, Oracle and KPMG are all cutting too, and none of them are calling it a straightforward layoff either. Barclays staff are revolting against a tighter office mandate, and new evidence says older workers and graduates are both being quietly filtered out of hiring.
In this week's Paper Cut:
- Why Uber, O...
One employee says his AI bonus scheme is really proof he's not needed anymore. Meanwhile UK data centres will create a quarter of the jobs the industry promised, managers are being cut in one company and asked back in another, and this week's reckonings over who pays land three different ways.
This week on Paper Cut:
- The datacentre jobs that aren't materialising, and the robots stepping in anyway
- Why workers are learning t...
Uber, Volkswagen and WPP all cut deeper this week, and the people who stayed were asked for more hours or more work, not more pay. Plus new data showing over half of laid-off workers don't believe the AI explanation for their own redundancy.
This week on Paper Cut:
- Uber's layoffs and the managers left holding a bigger workload
- Why over half of laid-off workers suspect AI is a cover story, and the university staff walking o...
Fei Zhaojun's boss asked if AI could replace coders. Two weeks later, he and 160 colleagues were laid off in Beijing. But a new HBR analysis, citing Goldman Sachs, argues most layoffs blamed on AI this year aren't actually AI's doing. Plus: Reed Hastings on why companies aren't families, Disney's early retirement memo, and why the graduate job market just hit its lowest point in a decade.
This week on Paper Cut:
- The Goldman S...
Diageo, Starbucks, Sanofi and KPMG all cut jobs this week, three of them calling it a turnaround and one unable to even manage the euphemism. UK productivity is finally moving, Dutch unemployment is rising for a third straight month, and a new peer-reviewed study of 7,704 healthcare workers found fully remote staff happier and less likely to quit than colleagues back at their desks. Plus: new research on what handing your thinking ...
TikTok wants staff back five days a week. Dropbox is doubling down on remote. This episode covers that split, plus Oracle's layoffs against Singapore's AI employment gains, hiring data that can't agree with itself, and who actually gets blamed when the work doesn't get done.
This week's Paper Cut covers:
TikTok's five-day RTO mandate versus Dropbox's virtual-first commitment, plus ABN Amro's RTO-and-layoffs combination
Oracle'...
The Bank of England says AI is lifting productivity and costing jobs, in the same breath. This episode covers that, plus a jobs report that says the market is fine while workers say otherwise, Gen Z's surprising ambition, and pay negotiation getting a new referee.
This week's Paper Cut covers:
- The Bank of England's dual verdict on AI, productivity and jobs, plus what "botsitting" is costing employees
- July's jobs report ver...
Employers are planning pay rises and more hiring this quarter. Visa, Uber, and CBA are cutting roles and citing AI, in the same week. This episode covers the split, plus AI adoption without training, RTO culture, and EBN and EBClub joining forces.
This week's Paper Cut covers:
- Pay rises and hiring plans at Japanese and Chinese employers, against AI-linked cuts at Visa, and AI substitution at CBA, Microsoft and Uber
US jobless claims just hit a decades-low. In the same week, Uber, British Gas, and Amazon all cut jobs citing AI, and Google employees organised a petition 4,500 signatures deep.
This week's Paper Cut covers: the contradiction between decades-low jobless claims and a steady drumbeat of AI-cited layoffs at Uber, Centrica, and Amazon, including the irony of Amazon cutting its own AGI team; Google's 4,500-signature petition for layo...
A lawsuit alleges an algorithm chose who got laid off at Meta, and allegedly targeted staff on protected medical leave. Volkswagen's threatened cuts just became a confirmed number. And a new phrase, the forever layoff, is giving language to something a lot of HR leaders have felt for a while.
This week's Paper Cut covers: the Meta AI layoff lawsuit and what it means for algorithmic accountability at the point of termination, not j...
Big Tech stopped hiding behind euphemisms on AI layoffs this week and flip-flopped on its own story, the labour participation drop finally got a number nobody can explain, and Volkswagen is weighing 100,000 job cuts as its old headcount math stops working.
This week's Paper Cut covers: Microsoft and Xbox naming AI displacement directly in layoff announcements, and the irony of the Fed appointing a CEO who just cut thousands to lea...
An algorithm ended up in court this week, an engineer described his job quietly outgrowing his week, and the labour market lost more people than the unemployment rate admits.
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This week's Paper Cut covers: the Workday age-discrimination case that could set a precedent for AI hiring tools everywhere; what AI is actually doing to engineers' confidence, f...
Twenty-one thousand jobs. One government tracker. Two banks that forgot their own RTO policy. Hot enough for you?
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This fortnight's Paper Cut covers four stories that connect in ways nobody is saying out loud. AI is reshaping the workforce faster than governance can follow. RTO mandates are cracking under the weight of their own inconsistency. Employee...
AI was meant to reduce work. Instead, employees are spending more time managing the machines. This week’s Paper Cut covers botsitting, broken graduate on-ramps, ghost jobs and regulated trust, white-collar hiring pressure, and The Cut List of layoffs shaped by AI spending and restructuring.
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Hashtags
#FutureOfWork #AIatWork #EmployerBrand...
Graduates are struggling to break in as hybrid becomes a career filter and AI work shifts into a blame-and-proof culture. We cover the broken on-ramp, token-driven measurement, WFH surveillance, labour market strain, and The Cut List of layoffs and restructures.
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Sources & Links
The early-career on-ramp
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